Wednesday, June 1

3Com settles 56K modem lawsuit, will provide $15 rebate coupons

3Com has settled a class action lawsuit which alleged that 3Com and its subsidiaries U.S. Robotics made misleading claims about the performance of the x2 protocol. In particular, the suit charged that 3Com engaged in false advertising by "claiming that modems employing x2 technology could achieve 56K speeds and/or were twice as fast as prior generation modems." In agreeing to the settlement, 3Com denied that it disseminated false or misleading information.

The $15 rebates are good towards the purchase of any new 3Com product priced at more than $100. To be entitled to the rebate, you must meet these terms, as presented in the settlement papers:

All Consumer retail purchasers of stand-alone, individually prepackaged, internal or external, Sportster or Courier 56K modems with x2 technology built in, where the purchase was made in the United States on or before May 31, 1997; and all Consumers who upgraded to x2 technology (from stand-alone, individually prepackaged, internal or external Sportster or Courier 33.6K modems purchased at retail in the United States) where the upgrade was received on or before February 28, 1998. However, the Settlement Class excludes all Released Parties (as defined in the Settlement Agreement and including the officers, directors and employees of 3Com, Fry's Electronics, Inc., Best Buy Co., Inc. and Egghead, Inc.) and any persons who purchased or acquired an x2 modem or x2 upgrade for purposes of resale.

As used in the above definition of the Settlement Class, "Consumer" means an individual person and does not include corporations, limited liability companies, partnerships or other business entities.

3Com also has a rebate frequently asked questions list that's much easier to understand.

Other news

Eric Pendergrass notes version 5.49 Lucent LT Win Modem firmware.

Beleaguered satellite phone company Iridium has averted bankruptcy by arranging extensions on its bank loans.

A Brazilian ISP using the aol.com.br domain won a trademark lawsuit brought by America Online. AOL may appeal.

Companies who want to provide interactive technical support without tying up 800-numbers may be interested in LivePerson, a web-based assistance program that allows customers to talk to a live customer service representative through a web interface.

Prodigy bought Cable and Wireless U.S.A.'s Internet dial-up service for US$50 to 75 million. Prodigy expects to net between 125,000 and 200,000 customers.

In response to last week's article on home networking, Dana Baggettt noted Farallon's HomeLine, the first HomePNA-compliant device that supports both Macs and PCs. Like other HomePNA devices, it uses existing household phone wires to network computers together, so new wiring isn't necessary. Thanks for Macs Only for the original link.

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Friday, June 4

Diamond Multimedia has licensed their Shotgun modem-bonding technology to Conexant Systems. Shotgun provides a flexible way of using multiple phone lines to increase Internet access speeds. Conexant Systems was created as a spinoff of Rockwell Semiconductor Systems, and makes modem chips for many other companies.

Lucent and Ascend plan to make their voice-over-IP (VOIP) features interoperable. Lucent bought Ascend in January.

3Com CEO Eric Benhamou clarified 3Com's market segment in relation to other telecom giants - such as Nortel, Lucent, Cisco and Microsoft - in a News.com interview.

Computer security

Jürgen Schmidt of c't magazine reports that Apple's Mac OS Server 1.0 has a bug which causes it to crash the system when multiple CGI calls are made to the Apache web server component. Apple has reproduced the bug, but does not yet have a fix. Some web sites using Mac OS Server have been unable to reproduce the bug. Slashdot and MacOSRumors have additional coverage.

Oracle has issued a security patch for UNIX versions of Oracle 8.0.3, 8.0.4, 8.0.5, and 8.1.5. The patch fixes a bug which can allow a remote user to access the information in the database.

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